Policy support
During the last years, the increasing significance of landscapes as a policy issue at the European level resulted in more information needs on the geographic distribution and typology of these landscapes. Policy implementation requires knowledge about the exact location, extension and characteristics of landscapes that receive policy interest. Despite a number of encouraging research activities in the field of landscape ecology and geography, there is still a lack of widely recognised landscape typology and mapping that can find applications in the policy field. While a number of useful landscape typologies and maps have been developed at the national level, European approaches towards landscape mapping are still facing severe problems in terms of scale, accuracy and policy relevance. Policy relevance depends on the degree of how much the level of scale corresponds with the level of actual decision making. For general assessments it might suffice to operate at the level of landscape regions while more specific question of policy implementation at the national and regional level might require differentiating between landscape types or units. At the European level, there are several major and gradually more and more interlinked policy instruments dealing with landscapes. Among these are:
- The Convention on Biological Diversity (CDB), 1992
- The Pan-European Biological and Landscape Diversity Strategy (PEBLDS), 1995
- The European Landscape Convention (ELC), 2000.
For the European Union important instruments have been included into Agenda 2000.
In addition to these substantiating them, there are many other instruments influencing landscapes such as agriculture, forestry, spatial planning etc. |
